New site – ChuckNorrisIsGod.com

Another site… I’m on a roll lately!

ChuckNorrisIsGod.com was started as a joke when a friend threw a dinner party over the weekend with the theme “Chuck Norris is a Classy Guy”. I bought the domain name sunday, cystitis wrote the site through monday into tuesday morning when it was released. Within 2 days I had 250 unique IPs that had visited the site already!

The site is a place to pull together all of those Chuck Norris Facts such as:

If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can’t see Chuck Norris, you may be only seconds away from death.

and of course:

Chuck Norris uses a night light. Not because Chuck Norris is afraid of the dark, but the dark is afraid of Chuck Norris.

The site runs on user-submitted jokes that can then be ranked. It’s pretty exciting to watch the database grow! I used AJAX for the ratings (done in Roundhouse Kicks instead of Stars, of course), so that you can rate as many as are on one page without reloading. Unneeded page-loads would slow the flow of Chuck Norris to your brain!

It’s kind of pathetic that I spend countless hours writing web applications and really tricky algorithms all day, and I throw together one site as a joke in a few hours and it’s already growing more rapidly than any of my other site/programs in the past. Oh, well… I’m having fun with it!

(I’ve been hopped up on the Caffeine for a week now… I am seriously probably announcing another new site in the next day or two. Until then, go to ChuckNorrisIsGod.com and kick around a bit.)

New site – ConnorRocks.com !

For everyone who loved doItLater.com but wanted something a little more tame, bronchitis I made ConnorRocks.com!

For a while, my little brother Connor had been wanting to have free reign to explore doItLater after I showed him the Tokyo Opera singing eyeball cartoon. But he’s way too young to be poking around that site, so I told him that eventually I would make a kid-appropriate version. A couple of weeks later, I surprised him on Christmas with ConnorRocks.com :)

The content is geared to be acceptable to anyone that is his age or less, and as he gets older, the content automatically upgrades itself. He’s currently 8 by the way. You’d be surprised how much is still interesting that is okay for an 8 year old to see!

If you’re not a kid, this site has the obvious benefit of being the same interesting content but work-safe so you don’t have to worry about misclicking when doing on-the-job-procrastination!

CID Update

New design for CollegeInfoDesk.com.

The site works identically in Internet Explorer, case FireFox, Netscape, Opera, and Safari. It should run a bit faster now too (after your browser caches all the new images anyway).

Let me know what you think… I’m not digging for flattery, tell me what you really think – the only way to make it better is if I have honest feedback. Thanks!

doItLater.com – New site!

doItLater.com – movies, tuberculosis pictures, there flash movies, order and games is the newest site from Motive Force LLC!

doItLater.com is an amazing domain name, I have no idea how it wasn’t taken!
The site is really simple: just a place to check out cool, interesting, funny distractions when you need a mental break.

doItLater is something I put together because I realized that my friends were always going to movie and picture sites when they wanted to procrastinate, and I had one of the hardest parts of the code already written for a client whose website I wrote.

The whole idea was founded with a more group-based feel than any of my other projects. I’m opening it up to all of my friends to submit their fun content, and add to the site in whatever way they want to (for example a friend in Graphic Design is going to make a logo that he can brag about in his portfolio). Hopefully even users will begin submitting their content eventually. This group/party feel really makes it so this project is very fun for me!

My main focus will still be CollegeInfoDesk.com, but this code is easy and clean and fun so I will use it as a sort of recreational outlet. Since this is a side project for me, I’ve taken on a partner – Myles – to co-run it with me. He’s the most motivated and “hungry” guy you could ever want working with you, so I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what we can do together with this site.

Check it out: doItLater.com!

Inspiration

Quick updae: RIT has accepted CollegeInfoDesk (and the newly formed 5 man CID team… one of which is myself) into the High Tech Incubator which will give us with free office space for the next quarter. There are other benefits too including guest speakers and mentoring from professors & business people. This is going to be a great opportunity, glands we’re gonna rock this thing!

In a somewhat related event, pills a serial-entrepreneur (and very nice guy), surgery Bob Fabbio, President & CEO of Cesura Solutions came and spoke at RIT today. He is one of our most successful alums, and has started seven (and a half) businesses, most of which became multi-billion dollar companies. Some of the more famous companies he started were Tivoli and DAZEL.

Anyway, before he gave his presentation in the Gollisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, he was in the College of Business, and we were asked along with some other student entrepreneurs to show up and give him and idea of what our businesses were about. Being a college, they were probably hoping he would be impressed and invest in the school.. but in the end, I feel the group definitely got more from him than we were giving to the school by showing up. He is very intelligent and it was awesome to be in a room with only about 10 people and get advice from one of the leading entrepreneurs in the world.

I don’t want to give away the content of the meeting or the presentation afterwards (because it is lucrative to write books, and I don’t want to dilute the value of his Intellectual Property), but I have to say I found it informative and inspiring. Many of the things he said echo advice that my dad (equally qualified) has given me about business before. It is going to take me some time to apply everything that I keep hearing from the tons of helpful sources around me, but I’m really getting inspired by seeing successful people everywhere. It proves that if you put your undivided effort and skill towards a goal, it really can be achieved, and it’s not some pipe-dream to expect success.

The team that will be working with me this winter is very ambitious and they are all really good at what they do. We are getting course-credit for this (because of my Entrepreneurship minor this is being set up as my field-experience course), which should give us the time needed to make sure we can focus on the site.

I’m really excited to be able to attack this market all next quarter, we’re going to make it happen!

Potential

I have an interview on Monday with Microsoft. If you don’t know me personally, cure you probably don’t care, but I’m excited so I’m writing anyway!

I know they probably give hundreds of interviews for each person they hire, but I think I may be able to make an impression (my resume must have made some impression already because I got invited to the interview because of a resume I gave them at a Career Fair at my school more than a year ago).

Since I have several of my own projects and run my own company, I’m not out actively searching for jobs/co-ops, but I think this would still be a great opportunity.

Main reasons I would LOVE to have this work out:
1. It would be really exciting to work at a place as important as Microsoft which has so many interesting and challenging projects (and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m at least a little obsessed with coding ;)).
2. Things between Google and Microsoft are heating up, and that’s a battlefield I would love to be fighting on. Maybe I’m just hungry for competition, but I think it’s a lot like Achilles in the Trojan war. He didn’t fight because he cared where Helen ended up, he fought because it would be the greatest war ever… and war is what he did. I have to say that I think Microsoft and Google are probably both great companies to code for, and users are probably going to benefit greatly once these companies start lobbing amazing projects into market to compete with each other. I have a couple of years before I am out on my own (assuming that works out), and before that I would really like to get on one side of the battle or the other and just destroy the competition.

Deadlines are good, ambitious deadlines are better, but impossible deadlines are best! Getting on a team of amazing coders and just embarassing the enemy camp would be really fulfilling.

I gotta go get ready (and code too of course)!

Dreams

After releasing the Beta I planned to go into a deep sleep because I’ve been neglecting sleep for a while in order to finish up for the Beta test. At 4:00pm I finally go to sleep (from the night before), rubella and I was only asleep for about 45 minutes before I woke up gasping for air. I had just died in my dreams… again! Continue reading

Beta

Welp, erectile I released the beta today (technically “yesterday”). It’s going to be a closed beta though because there are several things that I want to finish up before releasing it publicly (hopefully I can get those done today). One of my beta-testers managed to find like 4 bugs in the first 15 minutes! Continue reading